Yes, very much this
Robert Macfarlane: ‘He listened harder to prose than anyone since Melville’
British writer and fellow of Emmanuel College, Cambridge
Among the thousand things I could praise in McCarthy’s astonishing body of work – written over 60 years – I want to speak of his prose rhythms. His books proclaimed themselves in the mind’s ear, setting it thrumming and rumbling, piercing it with cries. He listened harder to prose, and thought more about its prosody, than anyone since Melville. He first outgrew, then radically exceeded, the dying falls of Faulkner’s cadences. His phrasing could be great page-long peals of thunder (the attack of the Comanches in the fourth chapter of Blood Meridian, say), wire-bright flashes of lightning (“The stars burned with a lidless fixity”), anaphoras that came to act as refrains across whole books (“They rode on”; “They walked on”), right down to the tender “OK” which is passed back and forth between father and son in The Road. The most important word in McCarthy’s lexicon was perhaps the least conspicuous: “and”. That little conjunction paratactically strung together the atrocious and the mundane, the ultra-violent and the kind. Morally, it had a similar power to the desert light that McCarthy describes as falling with “strange equality” upon “all phenomena”. Historiographically, it enacted McCarthy’s bleak view of human history: repetition, recursion, the illusion of progress, the endless beats of a death-drum sounded in the dark backward and abysm of time.
Cormac McCarthy remembered: ‘His work will sing down the centuries’
